Comrades on the Colca: A Race for Adventure and Incan Treasure in One of the World's Last Unexplored Canyons - Softcover

Buchanan, Eugene

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1942280351 ISBN 13: 9781942280354

Publisher: Bower House, 2016

Synopsis

A modern-day, real life adventure, this book will take readers along for a rollicking ride through South America on a race to the bottom of the Earth. When the author first met Polish explorer, Yurek Majcherczyk on a commercial feasibility expedition down Ecuador's Quijos River in 1989, he did not know it would lead to taking part in a Polish race, stumbling upon a mummy-filled cave and even getting wrapped up in a legend linking long-lost Incan riches to a riverfront castle in Poland. As the adventurers plunge deeper and deeper into unknown territory, they discover a rival Polish team trying to usurp their goal. The author seamlessly weaves these tales with his own exploits and adventures-climaxing with a tumultuous hike out of the canyon with both teams returning to complete their race the following year. Comrades on the Colca was a finalist for the 2017 Foreword Review INDIES Award.

About this title

About the Author

A former reporter for the Denver Business Journal and 14-year editor-in-chief of Paddler magazine, Eugene Buchanan has written about the outdoors for more than 25 years, from covering the X Games for ESPN.com to working for NBC at the Beijing Olympics. A Business/Economics graduate of Colorado College, where he captained his NCAA lacrosse team, the former ski patrol, kayak instructor and sea kayak and raft guide also enjoys a successful freelance career, with articles published in the New York Times, Men's Journal, Sports Afield, Outside, National Geographic Adventure, Adventure Journal, Skiing, Ski, Powder, Backcountry, 5280, Bike, Mountain Bike and other publications.

A member of New York's prestigious Explorer's Club, he is also the founder of Paddling Life (www.paddlinglife.net), and a Contributing Editor for Powder and Canoe & Kayak magazines.

An avid adventurer with several first descents to his credit, Buchanan's passion for traveling, writing and paddling has taken him to more than 30 countries on six of the seven continents, from Australia and Africa to South America and Siberia. A contributor to Men's Journal's The Great Lifeanthology, his first stand-alone book, Brothers on the Bashkaus, was released by Fulcrum Publishing in 2008. His second book, Outdoor Parents, Outdoor Kids, a winner of the Living Now Book Awards, was released by Heliconia Press in 2010, and his third book, Comrades on the Colca, will be published by Conumdrum Press in spring 2016. He lives with his wife, Denise, and two daughters, Brooke, 16, and Casey, 13, in Steamboat Springs, Colo., just a block away from the Yampa River.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Comrades on the Colca

A Race for Adventure and Incan Treasure in One of the World's Last Unexplored Canyons

By Eugene Buchanan

Conundrum Press

Copyright © 2016 Eugene Buchanan
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-942280-35-4

CHAPTER 1

The Cruz del Condor Expedition: The Beginning

I'm over this adventure stuff. My knuckles are infected scabs, my right calf pierced by cactus, and I'm dangling like a piñata from a rope dropping into Peru's upper Colca Canyon, the deepest gorge in the world. The winds carrying three hungry condors far above spin me like a fluttering leaf.

The rope slips and I drop five feet, jerking to another halt. Above me, Peruvian mountaineering guide Carlos Zarate peers over the edge of the cliff, fumbling with a carabiner. He's trying to lower me, but the rope — or something up there — keeps kinking. While he doesn't speak English, I know enough Spanish to realize he's swearing. Some of the Poles on the ledge below me are doing the same. Only they're swearing in Polish. I'm stuck in the middle of the cliff and attempting to communicate.

There's one person to blame for getting me into this mess — Yurek, Jerzy "Yurek" Majcherczyk. Dangling literally at the end of my rope, I blaspheme his name into the deep void below.

Yurek and I first met nearly twenty years earlier on an expedition down Ecuador's Rio Quijos. It was one of twenty-four major rivers he and a team of Polish university students explored in a thirty-three-month, twelve-country river-running rampage throughout Central and South America. The crown jewel was a first descent of Colca Canyon, from which they had barely escaped with their lives.

He's back now, twenty-seven years later, to explore and map the canyon's top twelve miles, which drop from 10,000 feet near the village of Madrigal to 7,250 feet at an oasis-like cluster of palm trees and huts called Sangalle. It's one of the world's true blank spots, and that's why one of the dry bags we're lugging around contains the official Explorer's Club flag, a badge of honor, of sorts, bestowed upon us by New York's esteemed Explorer's Club. If the organization deems an expedition worthy of its flag, by all means it must be worthwhile.

Still, knowing about Yurek's first Colca encounter, I should have said adios to this, his most recent exploration proposition. But Yurek can be convincing, calling and emailing several times. "Eu-shene, Eu-shene, you must come," he infectiously enthused. "It is virgin section of canyon." So I found myself signing on.

But right now I have other things to think about. Like how to get out of this mid-air mess.

There's nothing I can do. I'm being lowered, instead of rappelling myself, which means I'm at the mercy of Carlos above. Spinning around mid-air, I take in my surroundings. Downstream, the canyon twists and turns steeper and deeper into a tight incision, right where we're heading. It's been cleaved in two by the Rio Colca, with hardly a plant in sight. I spin ninety degrees and face the far cliff across the river. The rock is dark brown and ribboned with streaks of white quartzite. Four thousand vertical feet of sloping, crumbly rock rises into the sky. I'm glad to have my helmet on.

Another twist and I'm staring at the closer cliff again, whose overhang keeps it just out of reach. A few handholds cling to the cliff face like spaghetti noodles to a fridge. Perhaps I can reach one. The sense of grounding would at least beat these helpless gyrations.

The rope slips, dropping me another few feet. The holds are now out of reach. So much for that idea.

Carlos pokes his head over the cliff rim above, his thick, horn-rimmed glasses flashing in the sun. He doesn't look frantic, which is a good thing. More like the concentration of someone taking an exam. I see his elbow move above the horizon line, as well as errant strands of rope. He's working on something, which is good. Fate out of my hands, I take a breath and try to relax. It had been a long day, considering I woke up this morning in Beijing.

CHAPTER 2

Beijing to the Bowels of the Earth

I hadn't heard much from Yurek for several years before receiving a call from him just three months earlier in May of 2008. He wanted me to join him on an expedition down the Colca's Cruz del Condor, he said, the only section that had never been explored. He emailed me photos showing pools of water and rock-strewn cascades, book-ended by towering canyon walls. The photos might as well have been in black and white for their dreary lack of color.

Yurek was planning it to be a canyoneering expedition, but the kayaker in me was aroused. I'd rather be in a boat, I reasoned, than hiking, climbing, rappelling, and swimming. So I signed on, shipping a kayak down to Arequipa.

But life throws you curveballs. That July, the chance arose to work for NBC at the Summer Olympics in Beijing, right when Yurek was planning his trip. They wanted me for my paddling and journalism background, to help the announcers craft their storylines during the kayaking and canoeing events. So I emailed Yurek my regrets.

A few days later the phone rang again.

"Eu-shene, Eu-shene," he said in his all-too-familiar, thick Polish accent and dialog devoid of pronouns. "I have all figured out. We push trip back two weeks and wait for you there. You go to Beijing and then fly straight to Colca. But you must sleep on plane."

I wish I had listened to his advice.

With my wife's approval — she had been on a couple of trips with Yurek as well — I went for the six-week-long combo meal. I'd fly from Colorado to Beijing, and from there straight to Arequipa, Peru for a six-hour truck ride across the Peruvian altiplano (or puna; Spanish for high plain) to the world's deepest canyon. With any luck, I'd return home in time to coach my daughter's soccer team.

While fellow NBC staff packed their laptops and recorders, I packed my camping and paddling gear — including drytop, spray skirt, neoprene shorts, helmet, breakdown paddle, floatbags, throw rope, and rescue kit — and shipped it all to New York for Yurek to bring to Peru.

After examining the pools in the photos, I also suggested he take a few pack rafts on the expedition. Weighing just four pounds each, the craft, invented by an Alaskan grandmother for her son's adventure racing exploits, would be perfect. Team members could use them to shuttle themselves and their gear across and down the river wherever possible, while I merrily paddled along in my kayak. When it came time to portage, we could simply roll them up and carry them.

Our plans ironed out, I bid him adieu on the phone, agreeing to meet him at the put-in in just over three weeks' time. For now, it was on to Beijing.

After sidestepping Serena Williams and other stars at the Beijing Capital International Airport, I hopped a bus to the Olympic Village, which slowly picked its way through the city of eighteen million. My role was that of a "statistician," helping the announcers, who arrived straight from the Tour de France, with broadcast coverage of the paddling events. My job was to track down and feed them stories: the algae sticking to sprint boat rudders; the Australians naming the two main rapids "Wok and Roll" and "Stir Fry"; German kayaker Jennifer Bongardt appearing in Playboy; and French kayaking superstar Fabien Lefevre launching his own line of cologne. NBC had shipped five thousand pounds of Starbucks coffee grounds to its Beijing headquarters just to fuel our coverage.

Our sport was about to get a Yao-Ming sized boost thanks to NBC's record programming and it was my job to help them spin a good yarn. In short order I'd get plenty of tales to tell myself on the Colca, whose deepest point could stack more than two thousand seven-foot, six-inch Yao Mings head to toe.

Most of my own stories — the ones that I didn't feed to the announcers — came while I was off-duty. Like bumbling into the Water Cube and serendipitously watching Michael Phelps win his first of seven golds (which made me feel better about possibly swimming on the Colca). Or watching the Dream Team play hoops in front of an audience drinking seventy-five-cent Tsingtao beers, the government-mandated price so its people could have fun. Or drinking the same Tsingtaos with the Russian women's volleyball team while watching Rafael Nadal whoop Novac Djokovic in the tennis semi-finals. Or ending the evening somehow sharing a midnight hot tub back at the hotel with gold-medal-winning, super-heavyweight wrestler Rulon Gardner, any amorous thoughts I had for the Russians sinking with the rising water. Further vanquishing such notions: he lifted his right foot out of the water to show me a missing toe, the result of a Wyoming snowmobiling accident.

On my last night there, I noticed lavender orchids floating in my room's toilet bowl. Perhaps my stay in the land of Confucius made me wax poetic, but I realized there's a Yin-Yang beauty in everything, be it flowers spinning in porcelain toilet bowls or athletes narrowly missing the Olympic podium. Yin characteristics include soft, yielding, femininity, and passivity, which I didn't think there'd be much of on the Colca; more likely I'd experience Yin's cold, wet, and dark aspects. Yang traits include aggression, hard, solid, hot, dry, and sunlight. I might experience some of that down there as well. I could only hope what awaited me would have the upsides of both.

CHAPTER 3

Arequipa

It was a relatively brutal flight schedule. I flew straight from Beijing to San Francisco, then on to L.A., from there to Lima, and finally to Arequipa, without a break in between. I lost track of how many hours and time zones it all was.

Meeting me at the Arequipa airport at 5:30 a.m. was José Luis Conejo, wearing jeans and a gray and black alpaca wool sweater. The gray matched my jet lag and complexion and the pre-dawn hour. José didn't speak any English, but my Spanish, even after a month in Beijing, was good enough to make small talk as I loaded my duffle into the back of his white pick-up.

"Gracias para manajarme," I butchered. Thanks for driving me. "¿Vives aqui?" Do you live here?

As is usually the case, he assumed I spoke Spanish better than I did and launched into a fast-paced, five-minute answer I had a hard time understanding. I understood that he does, in fact, live in Arequipa, and has known Yurek for some time.

My attention turned to the traffic, which was buzzing this way and that like flies on a llama carcass. He handled the no-look, no-signal lane-changing common in Latin American countries as if he had studied it in college. While navigating Peru's second-largest city of 1.5 million was tame compared to driving the streets of Beijing, I was glad José was driving.

To our left sprawled downtown. The city's nickname, La Ciudad Blanca or White City, comes from its stonework, which, combined with its cobblestone streets and colonial architecture, makes it one of the prettiest cities in the country. Skyward behind us towered the volcanoes of El Misti, Pichu Pichu, and the largest, Chachani, topping out at 19,872 feet. They rise more than 10,000 feet above the city's 7,800-foot-high elevation. A local legend says that when the moon separated from Earth, it forgot to take Arequipa. What that means is unclear, other than that — surrounded by the three volcanoes and their barren geology — the White City is surprisingly lunar.

Arequipa's history dates back to the rise of the Incan Empire from AD 1200-1535. When the Inca arrived in the broad, arid valley, their leader Mayta Capuc ordered his entourage to stay. "Yes, stay" is pronounced "Ari Quipay" in Quechua. Spanish conquistadors kept the name when they refounded the city in AD 1540 as a key stop on the silver trade route from Bolivia to the coast.

José handed me two aspirin — as white as the city's namesake stonework — as well as a bottle of coca tea steeped in an old disposable water bottle. Both were for the altitude. While Beijing sits at 143 feet above sea level, Arequipa is at nearly 8,000. And we'd soon be driving over the nearly 16,000-foot-high Peruvian altiplano, the most extensive high plateau in the world outside of Tibet, to the village of Chivay in the upper Colca valley. Jet lagged or not, that's a three-mile rise in a single day. As the truck puttered out of town, I reached over to gulp another sip of coca tea from José's crinkled plastic bottle.

Also called mate de coca, the magical altitude elixir is made from raw leaves of the coca plant, which is native to South America. Just submerge them in hot water and hang on for the ride. Legal in Peru, Bolivia, Colombia, and Ecuador, the leaves are illegal in the United States due to their alkaloids, which, when extracted chemically, are the source of cocaine. While they've never been found to be addictive — some doctors, in fact, have even used them to wean cocaine addicts off the drug — their use in tea or chewing (often with lime) is as widespread as the Andes themselves.

While the leaves' active ingredient is just 0.8 percent, it's enough for a coffee-like pick-me-up. They also suppress hunger — good, since I'd been living on airline food for the past thirty-six hours — as well as thirst, pain, and fatigue. Loaded with calcium, they've been used indigenously for treating broken bones, childbirth, controlling bleeding, and even skull operations — which I might need for agreeing to join this zany expedition. They even serve as an aphrodisiac — an application I didn't think I'd need at the bottom of Colca Canyon.

I reached in my pack and pulled out a Snickers bar, offering José a piece. Coca leaves have long been used for trade between the lowland growers and the highlanders who rely on them. A candy bar trade seemed only fair.

Chomping on the Snickers, José smiled to reveal a mouthful of gold fillings, likely sourced from nearby mines. The area is rich in such minerals and a geologic wonderland. White ash still covers the foothills from the seventeenth century eruption of Huaynaputina, which destroyed Arequipa, and our road traverses miles of porous, milk-colored volcanic tuff topped by old lava flows. Later, we passed a cement factory making use of this compressed volcanic ash. My eyes felt like concrete, but I opened them in time to see a massive, two-tanked truck bearing down on us at a hairpin, returning from a nearby copper mine. It brings sulfuric acid (acido corrosive) up to the mine for leeching, and copper on the way down. I'm not sure which I'd rather get in a collision with — heavy copper or acid. At one narrow bend we saw an overturned truck off the road. Roadkill, Arequipa-style. Its wheels weren't spinning, but it still looked fresh.

Such carnage is par for the course here. Around the next turn, a memorial atop a steep drop-off marked the spot where ten years earlier a van filled with seven Polish tourists careened off the cliff, killing everyone. The accident made big news back in Yurek's home country.

Eventually, after passing a turnoff for Cusco and the mines, we settled into our cruising elevation of about 15,000 feet, before reaching our peak at 15,800. While it was hard to fathom wildlife living in such a barren landscape, José told me otherwise.

"Vicunyas," he said, pointing to a herd of distant relatives to the llama. This was my first Yin; their wool is finer and softer than that of even alpacas. Looking around at the barren landscape, I didn't think I'd feel too many soft things down in the canyon.

I drifted off to sleep again, waking at the summit of the pass, some fifty-three football fields higher than where I last laid head to pillow. Empty round stone huts dotted the countryside, remnants of a hearty breed of earlier animal herders. We were at the zenith of the altiplano, a high desert plateau where the Andes are at their widest.

I wasn't in much of a mood to celebrate; I had reached my own plateau as well. Dog-tired, disoriented, and thrust into an altitude-induced delirium, I stayed coherent long enough to order an egg and tortilla at a roadside shack before falling asleep with my neck kinked against the rattling door.

Soon we began our descent into Chivay, located on the upper reaches of the Colca Valley. At the town plaza, I got out to stretch my legs. In one corner a large arch framed a cement sculpture of mountains leading to a steep canyon. Mounted to it was a plaque commemorating Yurek and his team's 1981 first descent of nearby Colca Canyon. High on a nearby hillside, above a white church, a giant cross was etched into the slope's shrubbery. Certainly Yurek and his team made that sign themselves a few times on their harrowing journey through Colca, which capped their two-year river-running odyssey through Central and South America.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Comrades on the Colca by Eugene Buchanan. Copyright © 2016 Eugene Buchanan. Excerpted by permission of Conundrum Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Bower House
• Publication date: 2016
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1942280351
• ISBN 13: 9781942280354
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 254